SUMMARY
There is no problem and the proposed remedy is to change nothing.
RATIONALE
There is no problem.
One other change proposal says that no technology exists to convert images
to text. However, this is not true; for example OCR technology has existed
for decades and is widely available in both commercial off-the-shelf and
open-source packages.
That other change proposal also suggests that the spec might make it
unclear that authors should be the ones that give alternative text, rather
than automated tools. However, to draw such a conclusion one would have to
ignore the pages and pages of detailed instructions on how authors must
write alternative text, and one would have to ignore a big warning placed
immediately adjacent to the controversial paragraph asserting in no
uncertain terms that "authors must not rely on such behaviour".
That other change proposal further suggests that we should not suggest to
implementors that they help users understand images, because they will do
so without prompting. However, this would be inconsistent with the style
of the specification, which is to be explicit about everything and to
leave nothing to chance, especially not something as important as
accessibility.
Another change proposal suggests that not including more detail would be
missing out on an opportunity to increase competition in the field.
However, there's no reason to go overboard; just mentioning one simple and
unambiguously possible technique like OCR should be enough.
DETAILS
Change nothing.
IMPACT
POSITIVE EFFECTS
Leaving the text in will encourage implementors to explore the boundaries
of alternative text repair techniques, increasing the overall
accessibility of the Web over time.
NEGATIVE EFFECTS
Leaving the text without change might fail to highlight possible future
work, such as performing landmark recognition or facial recognition in
photographs, reducing the chances that an implementor will investigate
these groundbreaking image analysis techniques in the context of
alternative text repair.
CONFORMANCE CLASS CHANGES
None.
RISKS
It is suggested that mentioning that user agents might be able to repair
non-conforming pages could make authors less likely to write conforming
pages, though it is not clear why this would apply here and not in the
many other parts of the spec that mention repair techniques, especially
the sections that explicitly mandate specific user agent repair
techniques.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'